On May Day, Fidel Castro addressed over a million Cubans in Havana’s Revolution Square. Referring to Cuba’s moral victory at the UN Human Rights Commission and Cuba’s motion for a UN investigation into the US’ Guantanamo concentration camp, Fidel said ‘a crushing blow was dealt to the enormous hypocrisy, permanent falsehood and cynicism the masters of the world use to try to preserve the rotten system of political and economic domination they have imposed on the world’.
Fidel described Camp Delta as ‘one of the most horrendous examples of human rights violation ever to take place in this world’, adding: ‘They could have used their own territory for such a bizarre contribution to civilisation, but they did it on a stretch of land that they occupy illegally and forcibly in another country, Cuba, whom every year in Geneva they accuse of human rights violations’.
As for those countries which supported the US-sponsored motion against Cuba, Fidel described Peru as ‘an example of the degree of servility and dependence into which imperialism and its neo-liberal globalisation have led many countries in Latin America’. As for Mexico, ‘It is truly painful to see the great prestige and influence Mexico earned in the eyes of Latin America and the world, which stemmed from a genuine, far-reaching revolution, turn to ashes’. The US had historically stolen more than half of Mexico’s territory and 500 Mexicans die every year trying to cross the electrified fence on the US-Mexico border ‘all because of a brutal ruthless principle: free passage for capital and goods; persecution, exclusion and death for human beings… Will such an inequitable and unfair situation really be solved by voting for anti-Cuban resolutions in Geneva?’
Fidel characterised the European Union as ‘a Mafia mob allied with and subordinate to Washington’ and the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe who now cosy up to the imperialists as ‘a plague of renegades, anxious for the credits and goods of consumer society’.
He mocked such countries’ reaction to the Cuban proposal to investigate the Guantanamo Bay prison camp: ‘Panic spread through the herd of hypocrites, especially those from the European Community… they had to confess their failure to act according to their principles and their hypocrisy, or do the impossible – disobey the empire’.
Fidel then expressed his support for the Iraqi people, pointing out: ‘We do not support any government in Iraq or any given political system. This is the exclusive prerogative of the Iraqis’.
‘The enormous and growing world sympathy with the Iraqi people was generated by the brutal bombings of Baghdad and other cities which sowed terror and death among innocent civilians, totally ignoring the terrible trauma which will affect millions of children, adolescents, pregnant women, mothers and old people all of their lives, bombings for which there is no possible justification, based as they were on barefaced lies. This sympathy is growing because billions of people have come to realise that it is a war of conquest to gain possession of the country’s resources and raw materials.’
However, Fidel was confident that the people of the world would bring about change for the better in a world whose current economic system is unsustainable and compared the Iraqi people’s resistance to that of the Vietnamese people and the Algerian people’s war of liberation. That lesson of the ultimate invincibility of peoples’ resistance is applicable to the struggle of the Cuban people themselves. ‘We Cubans will continue…to wage our most resolute battle against those who give themselves the luxury of advocating political changes based on the physical removal of some of us…To those who persist in their efforts to destroy the Revolution, I simply say in the name of the crowd gathered here on 1 May, as I said at Giron and at other decisive moments in our battles:
Long live socialism!
Homeland or Death!
We shall be victorious!’
FRFI 179 June / July 2004
